Gordon Thomas: Gideon's Spies

Then came news, reluctantly confirmed, that the United States National Security Agency, NSA, had some 1,050 pages of documents on the couple. Al-Fayed launched an immediate court battle in Washington to obtain the documents.

“The more he is blocked, the greater is his determination,” said the loyal Meyer. But, like others, he is not holding his breath. “It could take years to work its way through the system.”

Part of the reason, I had discovered, was that Diana and Dodi had been under surveillance by ECHELON, one of NSA’s most sensitive and ultra-secret surveillance systems. This global electronic network is of truly astounding proportions. It links satellites to a series of high-speed parallel computers. The system enables NSA and those it allows to share information—Britain is one—to intercept and decode virtually every electronic communication in the world—in real time. Searching for key words it had been fed, ECHELON can identify and segregate messages of interest to its users.

Following her divorce from Prince Charles, Diana had launched her campaign to abolish land mines. She was blunt, outspoken, and quickly gathered support that was not welcomed by the Clinton administration or in London and other European capitals. She was seen as a meddler, someone who did not understand what she was talking about.

“The reality was that the land mine manufacturing industry provided thousands of jobs. No one wanted to see the mines used—but no one wanted people put out of work because Diana had a bee in her bonnet,” one Washington source told me; perhaps understandably he insisted on not being named in return for this insight.

The arrival of Dodi in Diana’s life automatically meant he became part of ECHELON’S collection activities. Unknown to them, their every conversation, however intimate, was silently gathered up by ECHELON’S satellites.

By 1997, Mohamed al-Fayed’s name had also been added to the global computer search. ECHELON may well have been the first outside his family circle to know of his hope that his son would marry a princess of the line—and then later his claim that on the eve of their deaths he had planned to announce their engagement.

There is much in the NSA documents that may still cause further surprise—and provide proof, through Diana’s own words, that she had indeed planned to marry her lover.

I only became aware of ECHELON’s role shortly before publication of the original edition of this book in March 1999. It was then that I also became aware of just how far the deaths of his son and Diana had continued to consume Mohamed al-Fayed. It was a jolting experience to be exposed to such uncontrolled grief and his anger and belief in a conspiracy that fed it.

On a March afternoon I met Mohamed al-Fayed in the privacy of his private salon on the fifth floor of Harrods. Guarding its approaches were his personal bodyguards. Al-Fayed told me they “are all former SAS soldiers, totally loyal to me. I pay them well. They make sure I live. I have been threatened so many times. My car is bulletproof.”

These revelations, delivered in a tense low voice, came as he entered the salon. I was not sure whether I should take his outburst as a warning or a reassurance I was safe to tell him anything he wanted to know.

He did not waste time in telling me what that was: access to all my Mossad contacts. “You give me the names. They give me the information I want. I give you one million pounds in whatever currency you want. No need to pay tax. I will take care of everything.”

I had been warned that there is still an element of a souk trader in al-Fayed. For the next twenty minutes he launched into a diatribe that I was not quite prepared for. He attacked the Queen and Prince Philip and well-known figures he called “establishment whores and pimps.” He reserved his greatest venom for the intelligence service, branding them “killers.”

Picking up my book, which had been marked and annotated in the margin, he said again: “Mossad are the people who can tell me the truth. Bring them to me and I will make you a very happy man.” Before I could respond, he launched an attack on Henri Paul: “I trusted him, really trusted him. I would have done anything for him because Dodi liked him. My son, like me, was too trusting. That was one of the reasons Diana loved him, wanted him to be her husband, a father to her children. But they didn’t want it. The Queen and her husband, her lackeys, that awful brother of hers, Earl Spencer… none of them wanted it. None of them wanted a Wog in the family. You know what Wog is? A Wily Oriental Gentleman. Only they didn’t see that Dodi was a gentleman. They smeared his character when he was alive. They continue to do so now he is dead. Yet all Diana needed was what she told me she needed: someone she could trust after all she had gone through…”

Those words do not convey the intensity of his delivery, the profanities he used, the wild hand gestures and, above all, the painful torment on his face. Mohamed al-Fayed was a man in pain. I could only listen as he continued to unburden himself.

“Did you know Diana was almost certainly pregnant… maybe eight weeks… and that Dodi, my son, was the father? Did you know that at the hospital in Paris, after her death, they removed many of her organs and that she came home to London as a mummy? Did you know that when we last met she told me how much she loved Dodi and how happy they were together?”

I said I did not know any of those things. For a long moment Mohamed al-Fayed sat there, tears close, his face working, lost in some inner world.

Then he said: “Tell me who can help me to find out all the truth about who arranged for my son and his beloved Diana to die?”

I told him I had in mind two people. One was Victor Ostrovsky (see chapter 10, “A Dangerous Liaison,” pp. 192–94, 208–10). The other was Ari Ben-Menashe.

“Find them. Bring them to me,” commanded Mohamed al-Fayed. At that moment there was more than a hint of an imperious pharaoh about him.

It took me a week to locate them. Ostrovsky was living in Arizona; he would only speak with me through an intermediary, a journalist who works for an Arab news magazine. In the end Ostrovsky had a short discussion with John MacNamara that led nowhere.

Ari Ben-Menashe had just returned from Africa when I spoke to him in Montreal. I told him about my meeting with al-Fayed. Ben-Menashe said “it is not altogether crazy what he says. That much I know already. There was a definite intelligence presence around Diana and Dodi in that last day in Paris.”

He agreed to meet Mohamed al-Fayed in London the following week, early April.

Ben-Menashe’s account of that meeting echoes what Mohamed al-Fayed had told me at our meeting. Ben-Menashe, a fastidious, unfailingly polite man, had been frankly shocked at the emotive language al-Fayed had used to attack members of the Royal Family. Nevertheless, he had agreed to make further enquiries in Tel Aviv to see how much more Mossad would be prepared to add to the material I had already published in the original edition of this book.

Ten days later he met with al-Fayed in his Harrods salon and told him that a number of intelligence services “might well have a case to answer.” Ben-Menashe added he would be happy to put his own staff to work on building such a case and suggested a retainer fee of $750,000 a year plus expenses to be agreed mutually.

Meantime, independent of Ben-Menashe, I had continued to make my own enquiries to establish the role ECHELON had played in the last days of Diana and Dodi’s lives.

I discovered through sources in Washington and elsewhere that the couple had continued to be under surveillance during the week they had spent cruising off the Emerald Coast of Sardinia on the Jonikal, the 60-meter yacht owned by Mohamed al-Fayed. ECHELON had also tracked the posse of paparazzi that had chased them in speedboats, on motorcycles, in cars. Time and again the Jonikal had evaded its pursuers. But ECHELON’s computers picked up Diana’s chagrin at being hunted. Conversations between her and Dodi, between the couple and their bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, recorded by ECHELON, all reflect her tense mood. On that Friday night, August 28th 1997, she told Dodi she wanted to go to Paris “as soon as possible.”